The NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory published the second installment of its special 4-part educational podcast series covering facets of pragmatic trial design that are essential to the success of embedded research.
Listen to the podcast. For alerts about new episodes, subscribe for free on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or SoundCloud.
Where Episode 1 of the series set the stage with an overarching discussion about pragmatic trial design, Episode 2 tackles the early stages of a pragmatic trial: piloting and assessing feasibility.
Pragmatic trials typically involve a variety of innovations, noted Greg Simon, senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. Where a randomized controlled trial might take place in a well-tread environment, embedding a trial into a healthcare setting introduces new feasibility questions at each step.
Gathering stakeholder insights is an important early step, added Sebastian Tong, associate professor of family medicine at the University of Washington and a co–principal investigator of AIM-CP, an NIH Collaboratory Trial.
“Can this be really integrated into that health system? Can you recruit patients in that way? How are you going to collect outcomes? Are there specific cultural adaptations you need to make? I think those are all questions that you need to start asking before you even put any pen to paper and write your application.”
Pilot testing and feasibility assessments, the speakers emphasized, provide researchers with an opportunity to be curious and to use their time, energy, and funds efficiently.
“ The one thing worse than doing a pilot test of an intervention that just does not work is to commit 5 years of your life to doing a pragmatic trial of an intervention that’s just not going to work,” Simon said.
The educational series provides investigators with the latest knowledge on how to design embedded pragmatic trials that are both feasible and capable of producing actionable evidence. Future episodes will be published on the fourth Tuesday of each month through the end of 2026.